Third Philippic (26-30)

And this is easily proved by a short calculation. I pass over Olynthus and Methone and Apollonia and the two and thirty cities in or near Thrace, all of which Philip has destroyed so ruthlessly that a traveler would find it hard to say whether they had ever been inhabited. I say nothing of the destruction of the important nation of the Phocians. But how stands the case of the Thessalians? Has he not robbed them of their free constitutions and of their very cities, setting up tetrarchies in order to enslave them, not city by city, but tribe by tribe?

Are not tyrannies already established in Euboea, an island, remember, not far from Thebes and Athens? Does he not write explicitly in his letters, I am at peace with those who are willing to obey me? And he does not merely write this without putting it into practice; but he is off to the Hellespont, just as before he hurried to Ambracia; in the Peloponnese he occupies the important city of Elis; only the other day he intrigued against the Megarians. Neither the Greek nor the barbarian world is big enough for the fellow’s ambition.

And we Greeks see and hear all this, and yet we do not send embassies to one another and express our indignation. We are in such a miserable position, we have so entrenched ourselves in our different cities, that to this very day we can do nothing that our interest or our duty demands; we cannot combine, we cannot take any common pledge of help or friendship;

but we idly watch the growing power of this man, each bent (or so it seems to me) on profiting by the interval afforded by another’s ruin, taking not a thought, making not an effort for the salvation of Greece. For that Philip, like the recurrence or attack of a fever or some other disease, is threatening even those who think themselves out of reach, of that not one of you is ignorant.

Ay, and you know this also, that the wrongs which the Greeks suffered from the Lacedaemonians or from us, they suffered at all events at the hands of true-born sons of Greece, and they might have been regarded as the acts of a legitimate son, born to great possessions, who should be guilty of some fault or error in the management of his estate: so far he would deserve blame and reproach, yet it could not be said that it was not one of the blood, not the lawful heir who was acting thus.